Exclusive: Spectrum demolition set for November

After sitting dormant for an entire year, the Spectrum is now walking the Green Mile en route to its day of reckoning ... or rather ... wreckoning.

In an exclusive interview with the Daily Times Comcast-Spectacor President and Chief Operating Officer Peter Luukko announced that the demolition of the Spectrum will begin in a little more than a month.

"The paperwork should be finished this week," Luukko said. "We will begin the demolition during the first week of November."

Luukko added that the process will take a little more time than it took for Veterans Stadium to become a pile of rubble and a memory.

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The Vet took 62 seconds, the Spectrum will take a little more than a month.

"You can't just implode it like you did the Vet because of the way it's built," Luukko said.

"The Vet had all those columns, so all you had to do for that was strap some dynamite to each column and watch it collapse on itself.

"The Spectrum would have to be blown up in pieces, and that doesn't make any sense, so we're going to just take a wrecking ball to it."

That's not to say there won't be anything ceremonial.

"We'll start by gutting it from the inside," Luukko said. "Then, sometime in December, when it's just a shell, we'll have a little ceremony and we'll take down the exterior with the wrecking ball."

The Spectrum was first committed to sports arena death row in January, 2008 when it was first reported in the Times that it was going to be razed in favor of a new hotel and entertainment complex in South Philadelphia known as "Philly Live!"

The project, which will be constructed by the Cordish Co. of Baltimore, Md., will bring a series of shops, restaurants, bars and night clubs to the South Philadelphia sports complex area and will take up a significant piece of land on the property where the Spectrum and its parking lots sit.

Luukko added that the plans are in place for the beginning of the construction of that project as well and that groundbreaking will occur soon after the Spectrum is a memory.

The Spectrum hasn't housed an event since last October, when a Pearl Jam concert closed the building.